We cannot say it enough. Our .NET family of developers is pretty awesome. We continually meet new people everyday that continue to impress and amaze us. Here are two members of the .NET developer and NCover community that we would like to introduce you to.

Paul Hacker

Paul Hacker has over 10 years of application architecture, design, development, and management expertise in Microsoft technologies. His strong technical aptitude, excellent communication skills, and dedicated work ethic have enabled him to drive and deliver successful projects and solutions to clients.

Paul has a depth of experience in ALM, Process Improvement, and Team Foundation Server. Having distinguished himself as a leader in the IT industry he has been awarded the distinction of Microsoft MVP in the ALM category every year since 2006.

Over the years Paul has proven his expertise in Application Lifecycle Management and has demonstrated his professionalism and commitment to the continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. Keep up with him on his blog or follow him on twitter @pjhacker

Shannon Deminick

Shannon has a passion for development, he does it for work and for fun. He started developing as a teenager when the interwebs were becoming cool (MIRC was the thing to do), and has been specializing in web development since he left college over a decade ago.

During the day, he is a full time developer for Umbraco, working on the core development team for about 5 years. For the 5 years previous to starting at Umbraco HQ, he worked as the Technical Director for TheFARM Digital in Sydney, Australia. Some other open source projects he’s started are: Articulate – blogging, Examine – search engine, ClientDependency – web resource management and uComponents – plugins for Umbraco. He is also a Microsoft MVP.

During his free time (besides doing more developing), he loves to surf, travel, relax and generally just like to hang out with good friends. Keep up with his adventures on his blog or on twitter @Shazwazza.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has a significant role in managing and documenting software requirements and in improving products development when used correctly. REConf 2015 focuses on how requirements management and requirements engineering can help you to improve the product development process.

ALLIANCE 2015 CONFERENCE, Nashville, Tenn. â€“ March 16, 2015 â€“ To help higher education institutions enhance student engagement and retention, Oracle today announced Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement. The scalable, industry-specific solution is designed to help marketers in higher education institutions of all sizes improve student success by enhancing targeting and engagement, and improving orchestration of student marketing efforts across multiple channels.

Higher education institutions are going through a rapid transformation that is influenced by changes in government and shifting student expectations. These changes combined with increased competition for enrollment, increasing dropout rates and new funding criteria make it more important than ever for higher education institutions to implement marketing programs that can both attract and retain students and engage alumni.

The new Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement solution provides advanced targeting and segmentation capabilities that help marketers in higher education institutions address these challenges and deliver the right messages to the right students at the right time. The scalable solution features pre-built data models and customized campaign templates (based on industry best practices) focused on student outreach and retention that help marketers rapidly deploy effective student-centric multi-channel campaigns.

â€śWe are using Oracle Marketing Cloud to engage our large and diverse student and alumni base with highly targeted campaigns,â€ť said Jessica Stutt, marketing automation specialist, University of New Brunswick. â€śSince implementing Oracle Marketing Cloud, weâ€™ve been able to convince more and more stakeholders that segmenting and targeting is much better than batch-and-blast. Weâ€™re now seeing average open rates of 39 percent â€“ and weâ€™ve only just begun.â€ť

Build stronger student experiences: By managing every interaction in studentsâ€™ higher education journey across channels and devices, the new solution helps higher education institutions to shift the focus from managing transactions to building student relationships, resulting in improved outreach, retention, and student success. Increase student engagement: By delivering timely and relevant content that prompts students to take action and stay engaged, the new solution increases the chances of students staying on track, achieving greater performance and reaching their academic goals. Manage multi-channel interactions: By enabling higher education institutions to provide a cohesive, personalized, and multi-channel student experience, the new solution helps optimize operational efficiency and institutional performance, improve recruitment effectiveness, and further enhance student engagement.

Oracle Marketing Cloud for Student Engagement is one of the capabilities within Oracle Student Cloud, a complete, modern student solution designed to meet the needs of 21st century education, and adds further depth to Oracleâ€™s portfolio of industry-specific marketing solutions.

Oracle Marketing Cloud now has industry-specific marketing solutions for higher education, manufacturing, wealth management, insurance, asset management, sports, entertainment, nonprofits, and life sciences. Each industry product is developed with the industry user in mind, incorporating marketing, content, and data analysis best practices.

Oracle Data as a Service for Marketing Connects B2B Marketers with Millions of Business Professionals and Decision-Makers300 million anonymous audience profiles and 100 million known professional contacts help marketers prospect across e-mail and digital media channels

Redwood Shores, Calif. and SXSW, Austin, TX â€“ March 16, 2015 â€“ Business-to-business (B2B) marketers must constantly reach new audiences in order to increase the number of sales leads and opportunities to drive sales conversion. Their challenge is to efficiently target qualified audiences while not wasting impressions and dollars on businesses or people who are not qualified buyers. To help marketers identify, qualify, and target new professional audiences with more relevant cross-channel messages, Oracle today extended Oracle Data as a Service for Marketing (Oracle DaaS for Marketing) with the release of a comprehensive B2B data set for smarter prospecting. The offering spans anonymous audience data for digital media targeting as well as known profile and business data for database enrichment and e-mail prospecting.

â€śData targeting is no longer a strategy employed only by consumer marketing professionals,â€ť said Omar Tawakol, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Data Cloud. â€śBy bringing data as a service to marketers, we are providing a new world of external data that enables targeting accuracy and scale to every B2B interaction.â€ť

As part of Oracle Data Cloud and reflecting Oracleâ€™s commitment to deliver DaaS to power smarter marketing decisions, the B2B audience data set was developed in collaboration with some of the biggest B2B data providers, including Dun & Bradstreet and Madison Logic, to meet the increased demand for third-party business data among B2B marketers.

B2B marketers can now access 300 million anonymous business profiles from Oracle BlueKai Audience Data Marketplace or through Oracle Data Management Platform, part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, to help identify their ideal audience and enhance their media efforts with targeting precision and scale. The data set includes more than 200 targeting attributes, including granular targeting against company age, size, industry, sales volume, employee type, role, and more.

In addition, Oracle Marketing Cloud customers and other B2B marketers looking to tap into new prospecting lists for e-mail campaigns, database cleansing, or profile enrichment can now access such data from a self-service DaaS interface. They can easily build net-new account and contact prospecting lists leveraging Dun & Bradstreetâ€™s trusted source of more than 240 million companies, create a more complete profile of target accounts and decision-makers including social attributes, and enrich existing databases with information on more than 100 million US contacts.

This combination of known and anonymous B2B data arms marketers with comprehensive information to better target and provide a consistent experience across e-mail, paid media, and personalization efforts for online, video, and social platforms.

To help ensure the data is actionable into all marketing channels, Oracle DaaS offerings are available across the largest ad technology partners via Oracle BlueKai Audience Data Marketplace Data as a Service as well as through Oracle Applications Cloud solutions, including Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Sales Cloud.

Ohio County Deploys Oracle Communications Solution to Launch Secure, Reliable Emergency Calling SystemDeveloped by partner General Dynamics Information Technology and leveraging a solution from Oracle Communications, the new 911 system provides Morgan County first responders with more-precise information on a secure, IP-based systemREDWOOD SHORES, Calif. â€“ March 16, 2015

IP communications technology is quickly advancing, and one sector taking advantage of the progress is government. Recognizing the untapped potential for emergency systems, Morgan County, Ohio, deployed Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1), which was developed by General Dynamics Information Technology in July 2014 and uses an Oracle Communications solution. The new system will enhance public safety by improving communications among responders, dispatchers, and agencies. And, with the Oracle Communications solution in place, the IP-based system will be highly available and secure, allowing Morgan County to enjoy all the benefits of a state-of-the-art, IP-based emergency calling system without compromising service quality or availability.

â€śOur constituents depend on us to provide emergency calling services that are both reliable and secure. Working with the General Dynamics team and leveraging an Oracle Communications solution, we were able to launch a new 911 system that takes advantage of the latest IP communications technology and still maintains the reliability of our legacy system. The General Dynamics deployment of our NG9-1-1 system with Oracle Communications technology gave us the best of both worlds, and most importantly, gave our constituents even more peace of mind that Morgan County is focused on their safety,â€ť said David Bailey, 911 coordinator, Morgan County, Ohio.

Morgan County is one of the first municipalities in the country to deploy NG9-1-1. This move from a legacy Enhanced 911 calling system was supported by General Dynamics and allows the county to receive emergency service requests from public networks using a variety of devices and communication methods including voice, messaging, and video.

To protect and control this new IP-based communications infrastructure, the emergency system was implemented alongside Oracle Communications Session Border Controller, which delivers service reliability comparable to the legacy public switched telephone networks. The Oracle solution mitigates denial-of-service attacks and service overloads and routes sessions around equipment or trunk failures, enabling highly secure, reliable, and scalable communications services.

â€śWith the new IP-based technology available today, the potential is huge for the public sector, but itâ€™s critical to incorporate the right security and reliability safeguards as well. Morgan County definitely struck the right balance with its new NG9-1-1 system. Oracle Communications is proud to be a part of their success, helping to ensure that the system is secure, reliable, and scalable,â€ť said Steve Aulds, vice president of product development, Oracle Communications.

The Oracle Communications technology described here is on display at Enterprise Connect 2015 in Oracle Communications booth 321.

Oracle Introduces Oracle Data as a Service for Customer IntelligenceNew Oracle Data Cloud service enables organizations to leverage intelligence from direct or indirect customer feedback across all channels to gain unique business insights

Redwood Shores, Calif. and SXSW, Austin, TX â€“ March 16, 2015 â€“ To help organizations increase customer understanding and uniquely extract meaningful insights from any form of indirect or direct customer feedback, Oracle today announced Oracle Data as a Service (DaaS) for Customer Intelligence. The new Oracle Data Cloud product is designed to help organizations extract and unify insights from a growing world of unstructured data assets. These insights can be used to capture a complete view of customer input across social and enterprise channels, identify and manage customer issues, understand how customer voice is impacting sales, and ultimately arm businesses with the intelligence to create happier customers.

Organizations are struggling to deal with unprecedented amounts of customer data. While many organizations have visibility into marketing and social conversations, most donâ€™t have the ability to connect those with data from customer service channels for a broader view of the customer voice and how it impacts overall business.

Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence helps organizations address these challenges by unifying customer data across all social and enterprise service channels into aggregated signals about customer intent, including topics, indicators, themes and sentiment. By unifying different unstructured customer data sources, the new Oracle Data Cloud offering enables organizations to rapidly identify trending topics and emerging issues, and better detect brand sentiment to enhance customer intelligence and inform smarter service and product decisions. Using a proprietary blend of keyword/Boolean search, latent semantic analysis and natural language processing, Oracleâ€™s Semantic API can help organizations categorize, and extract structured insight from any type internal or external unstructured data, including chat logs, forms, surveys, comments, and user forums. Leveraging the same technology, Oracleâ€™s Enriched Social Data Feed can extract pure signals from more than 700 million social messages daily, across more than 40 million social sites.

â€śKnowing more about your customers and prospects â€“ what they do, say and buy â€“ is key to driving competitive business insights and actions,â€ť said Omar Tawakol, group vice president and general manager, Oracle Data Cloud. â€śWith the release of Oracle Data as a Service for Customer Intelligence, businesses can tap into what customers â€™sayâ€™ by unifying and analyzing the growing world of unstructured data across social messages, chat logs, reviews, surveys and transcripts into digestible and actionable customer insights.â€ť

â€śUnstructured text and data is an increasingly challenging area for organizations to tackle, but has the potential to unlock the most competitive insights,â€ť said David Schubmehl, Research Director at IDC. â€śOracle Data as a Service for Customer Intelligence is a key driver for unlocking structured insights from the world of unstructured data, giving businesses the customer information they need to make a real business impact.â€ť

Key Benefits of Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence Global customer understanding: With latent sentiment analysis available in more than 20 different languages, Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence significantly increases customer understanding for global enterprises. Accurate categorization: Oracle Data Cloudâ€™s advanced listening technology has demonstrated categorization accuracy to enhance an organizationâ€™s ability to turn massive amounts of unstructured data into valuable customer signals. Prior to Oracle acquiring the listening technology, 95 percent accuracy was demonstrated through third-party validation. Big data scalability: In contrast to smaller point solutions, Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence enables organizations to listen and ingest data across 40 million sites and analyze hundreds of millions of documents daily to expand customer understanding. Extensibility: Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence is a standalone service that can be plugged into an organizationâ€™s business intelligence tool of choice or any Oracle cloud solution.

Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence is the latest addition to the Oracle Data Cloud, a cloud solution that provides businesses with the richest understanding of consumers across both digital and traditional channels based on what they do, say and buy. With an enterprise-ready data portfolio spanning assets across offline, online, mobile and social, Oracle DaaS offerings enable data-driven businesses to personalize and measure every customer interaction.

Oracle DaaS for Customer Intelligence joins existing Oracle Data Cloud solutions, including Oracle DaaS for Marketing and Oracle DaaS for Sales. The Enriched Social Data Feed is offered as a standalone data service through Oracle Data Cloud and is also a capability of Oracle Social Cloudâ€™s Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform that includes listening, engagement, publishing, content, applications, and analytics. It is also extensible to the Oracle Marketing Cloud which can leverage and activate intelligence from unstructured data through the Oracle Data Management Platform to use for smarter audience segmentation and targeting via digital and social marketing and cross-channel marketing platforms.

The 12th Annual FST EU Summit will bring together decision makers and business leaders from across the region. These three core themes represent the business critical challenges driving your conversations at the summit:

Running IT-as-a-business: How the CIO's Role has Evolved
The Role of the CIO as Chief Agility Officer

Modernizing your Infrastructure and Securing the Enterprise
The Financial Industries Data Centre Infrastructure of the Future

System and software safety in electronic systems is becoming increasingly central in many industries. The systems become ever more complex and the software continues to grow. Some industries are quite mature in the handling of safety, whereas others have only recently started their safety journey.

This year's conference on safety critical system and software is a central meeting place for Scandinavian safety experts from different industries. It is an opportunity to share experiences and make new contacts.

Press Release
Oracle Social Cloud Adds Support for Instagram and Weibo
Latest release expands capabilities to reach, target and engage with global consumers in expanding and fragmented social media environment

Redwood Shores, Calif.—Mar 13, 2015

To help organizations efficiently reach, target and engage global consumers on social media channels, Oracle today announced that Oracle Social Cloud's Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform now supports Instagram and Weibo. With the new capabilities, Oracle helps organizations deliver the best possible customer experience by adding two of the world's fastest-growing social media platforms to the expanding lineup of social networks supported by the Oracle Social Cloud.

The social media landscape is continually expanding and has become increasingly fragmented. A recent study by Pew Research found that the number of online adults using two or more social channels increased from 42 percent in 2013 to 52 percent in 2014. This fragmented environment makes it more difficult than ever for organizations to gain a clear view of the customer and efficiently manage interactions across all social media channels.

With the new capabilities, Oracle Social Cloud will now provide engagement and analytics support for Instagram; and publishing, engagement and analytics support for Weibo. The addition of Instagram helps organizations leverage one of the fastest-growing social networks in the world to engage the coveted young adult category. The importance of images on social media has elevated Instagram's popularity with more than half of internet-using young adults, ages 18-29, using the platform today. Weibo is a highly popular social network that is used by more than 175.7 million Chinese consumers and 800,000 businesses connecting for communication, information, engagement and commerce.

"We are excited about our relationship with Oracle. This relationship will enable Oracle's global customer base to better understand and engage with Weibo's tremendous Chinese user base," said Bryan Cheng, general manager of Weibo Business Product and Platform Division. "Weibo strives to provide a social platform where consumers, businesses, and celebrities can better connect and engage in a lively online environment."

"As more social platforms emerge, the ability to monitor, engage, and gain valuable customer insights in a single management hub is critical to enhance the performance of social business," said Meg Bear, group vice president, Oracle Social Cloud. "The ability to monitor more platforms in more languages with advanced listening and sentiment analysis, and engage in real-time, in-context conversation gives organizations the ability to build customer-centric social relationships on a global scale and significantly improve the customer experience."

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit http://www.oracle.com.

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The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.

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